Featured
Marilyn Narota
Tattfoo Tan
Prof:0und for Von Davien
Prof.Ound is a Black, disabled, nonbinary artist, organizer, and self-described 'underground ecologist.' Since 2017, Prof.Ound has used their love for African-American folk spirituals, theatre, and speculative art to facilitate workshops about environmental issues that combine scientific scholarship with digital media and ritual performance. Bronx-born and raised, Prof.Ound is devoted to building communities of resistance among marginalized populations disproportionately impacted by environmental injustices.
Nancy Nowacek
Nancy Nowacek is an artist and designer. Her work focuses on the habits and practices of daily life as they relate to the natural and built environment, and the systems that produce and are produced in them. Her practice encompasses a wide spectrum of research: climate change, land use, the labor and leisure, and feminism and aging. She has shown work in the United States, Canada, China, the Netherlands, and Venezuela. She is co-founder of artist collective Works on Water and teaches at the Stevens Institute of Technology. She is currently Education Artist-in-Residence at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Kamau Ware
Kamau Ware is a multidimensional creative blending complementary yet disparate disciplines as an Artist / Historian. Ware retells and expands history with scholarship and visual storytelling to fuse creativity and learning into one experience. He is best known for his flagship storytelling project, Black Gotham Experience (BGX), which is an immersive multimedia project founded in 2010 that reimagines the African Diaspora as one unified epic through a series of experiences including walks, talks, media, and events. Kamau Ware is the author of a forthcoming graphic novel series based on the five core historic walks of the Black Gotham Experience.
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow is a 1.5 generation Jamaican-American interdisciplinary artist living and working in Queens, NY. Her work often explores performance and installation art drawing from the nostalgia of her homeland, Caribbean folklore, fantasy, feminism, globalism, spirituality, environmentalism, and migration.
She holds a BFA with honors from New World School of the Arts, University of Florida and an MFA from Hunter College, CUNY. Lyn-Kee-Chow’s exhibitions of note include “Jamaican Pulse: Art and Politics from Jamaica and the Diaspora”, Royal West Academy of England, Bristol, UK (2016), a special project commission at “Jamaica Biennial”, The National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, JA (2017), “Live Action 12” in Gothenburg, Sweden (2017), Guangzhou Live 5: International Performance Art Festival, China (2014).
Lyn-Kee-Chow’s work has garnered a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award in Interdisciplinary Art (2012), Rema Hort Mann Artist in Community Engagement Award (2017), Franklin Furnace Fund (2017-18), Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice (2018), and Queens Art Fund (2019). She is also a faculty member at School of Visual Arts, NY.
https://www.jodielynkeechow.com/
Denae Howard
Featured
Simone Johnson
Simone Johnson is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and cultural worker based in NYC. She mostly makes work about water. She is currently interested in wetlands, rivers and the ocean. She has been a resident with Works on Water and is a former Culture Push Climate Justice Fellow. Simone also has a background in urban agriculture, plant medicine, Teaching Artistry and performance art.
Eve Mosher
Eve Mosher is a cultural change entrepreneur working at the frontline of climate change and the urban environment. She creates space for possible futures. Her work explores individual agency in transforming the systems that have led to this moment. She is uplifting what is possible through creative engagement, multi-sensory collaboration and radical imagination. She has been creatively working on the climate crisis since 2007, but none of her previous experience, accolades, press or degrees have adequately prepared her for the moment we are in.
Carolyn Hall
Carolyn Hall is a Brooklyn, NY based Bessie award winning freelance dancer/performer, historical marine ecologist, and science communication instructor. As a freelance ecologist her research focuses on the past and present impacts humans have on shoreline ecosystems and the creatures within them. She is increasingly invested in combining her artist and scientist halves in public processes to make data-rich science more understandable, embodied, and memorable for the general public.
For her WoW residency, she will be asking questions about New York City’s long history and current relationship to fish and fisheries through an installation and embodiment of timelines. Timelines that span from "prehistory" to today. Timelines that explore connections stemming from documentations of fish species in NYC waters to our past and current questions about residence, im/migration, fluid boundaries, consumption, the value of an object vs. a living contributor to an ecosystem, and economy.
photo credit: Tara Duffy
Sherese Francis
Sherese Francis is a southeast Queens-based poet, literary artist, workshop facilitator, and literary curator of the mobile library project, J. Expressions. She has published work in journals and anthologies including Cosmonauts Avenue, No Dear, Apex Magazine, La Pluma Y La Tinta's New Voices Anthology, The Pierian Literary Review, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, Newtown Literary, Blackberry Magazine, Kalyani Magazine, and Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Arts Inspired by Octavia Butler. Additionally, she has published two chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls and Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling. Currently, she is the co-editor and board member of the small press, Harlequin Creature, and a core member of the Southeast Queens Artist Alliance.
Elizabeth Velazquez
Elizabeth Velazquez is an interdisciplinary artist and a public school visual arts educator. She is one of the founding members of SEQAA- the Southeast Queens Artist Alliance, which is an artist collective focused on working in SEQ. In 2020 she participated in the Winter Workspace Residency Program at Wave Hill, located in the Bronx. Velázquez has exhibited and performed at venues throughout New York, including Cigar Factory, Knockdown Center, and NARS Foundation.
Sarah Cameron Sunde
Sarah Cameron Sunde is an interdisciplinary artist and director working at the intersection of performance, video, and public art, investigating scale and duration in relationship to the human body, the environment, and deep time. She was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her ongoing series, 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013 - present). Other honors include two MAP Fund Grants, NYSCA, Watermill Center Residency, Baryshnikov Residency, Princess Grace Award, and ongoing support from Invoking the Pause. Solo exhibitions include The Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA; NYU Gallatin Galleries, New York, NY; Oude Kerk, Amsterdam; and Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Tamaki Makaurau-Auckland. She holds a B.A. in Theater from UCLA and an M.F.A. in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice from The City College of New York, CUNY
Nicki Pombier
Nicki Pombier is an oral historian, writer and educator, and founding editor of Underwater New York. Her work in oral history engages the arts, disability justice and social change, with a particular focus on how to be a narrative ally, collaborating across ability. She is passionate about teaching and learning, and works with undergraduates at the College of Performing Arts at The New School and graduate students in the Oral History Master of Arts Program at Columbia University.
In all that Nicki does, she strives to work oral historically—deeply invested in co-creation, grounded in listening, with a rigorous ethic around stewarding stories into the world, in the labor of belief that doing this work might create better conditions for justice, repair, restoration, and restitution.
More about Nicki’s work can be found at www.nickipombier.com
Edmund Mooney
Clarinda Mac Low
Clarinda Mac Low began in dance and molecular biology and now creates participatory events investigating social constructs and corporeal experience. She is Executive of Culture Push, an organization linking artistic practice and civic engagement, and one of the co-founders and core team members of Works on Water. Mac Low’s recent work includes: “Sunk Shore,” a speculative tour of the future; “Incredible Witness,” game-based investigation of the sensory origins of empathy; “Free the Orphans,” spiritual and intellectual implications of intellectual property in a digital age; and "Cyborg Nation," public conversation on the technological body and intimacy. Residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, and Mount Tremper Arts. Grants/Honors: BAX Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant and Franklin Furnace grant. She has received BA Dance and Molecular Biology (Wesleyan University) and and MFA in Digital Interdisciplinary Arts Practice (CCNY-CUNY).
sTo Len
sTo Len is a genre fluid artist with interests in printmaking, installation, sound, video and performance. The cross-disciplinary nature of Len's work includes ongoing collaborations with bodies of water, transforming public space into art studios, recycling waste into art materials, and hosting performances at Superfund sites. sTo Len is based in Queens, NY with familial roots in Vietnam and Virginia, and his work incorporates these bonds by connecting issues of their history, environment, traditions and politics. As part of WoW, Len created the Newtown Creek Center for Visual Research in Maspeth, Queens, and WoW Radio, a water-themed pirate radio show on Governors Island. www.stoishere.com
Rejin Leys
Rejin Leys is a mixed media artist and paper maker based in New York whose work has been exhibited internationally and is included in several public collections. Her PulpMobile papermaking studio on a cart is an interactive public art project which has been active at community events and public art festivals. Leys is a recipient of a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She received a BFA from Parsons School of Design and an MFA from Brooklyn College.
